WHITNEY HOUSTON – "Saving All My Love For You"

I can’t muster any enthusisam for this at all given the horrors to come from Ms Houston and her imitators. The best I can come up with is that she isn’t (perhaps wasn’t allowed to be) as self-indulgent on this as on later singles. Oh and she looked very fetching in the video.

SwedenWatch: Didn’t chart in the top 20, nor did it appear on the Tracks chart.

So I was rather surprised when I recognised the song perfectly well. And it’s a strange sort of recognition, stripped of any traces of childhood nostalgia – it makes me think I’ve heard it in more recent years, but I can’t for the life of me figure out where or when (which is unusual for me). I don’t own any Whitney Houston records, and have never been a big fan, so that can’t be it. And I tend not to listen to the kind of radio stations that would play a song like this nowadays. The whole thing bothers me a little, as I usually take pride in my metacognitive ninja skillz.

Anyway, I agree more or less completely with Tom. I like how Houston sings in a fairly restrained manner, but occasionally almost growls out the lyrics – those “To-NIGHT is the NIGHT” bits are absolutely the best parts of the song. This style of delivery is infinitely more attractive than the full-on hurricane approach that I associate with Whitney (you know, THAT song).

I kind of enjoy the arrangement too. I assume it’s meant to sound sophisticated and grown-up, but it comes out as tinny and cheap (the electric piano and dry snares in particular). It produces a jarring effect that’s quite interesting, even if I don’t think it’s intentional in any way. I wonder if it’s even possible to create it intentionally.

Be interesting to have someone who knows the score explain how much of this is a Clive Davis record, and how much is Whitney. Not her first recordings, I believe – didn’t she sing on one song on one of those Golden Palominos records, or Material? Either way – one of those NY-avant-gardists-do-collaborative-pop albums

An 8 verging on a 9 from me. Her voice really is remarkable. I don’t listen to Whitney H. much or to her successor divas – it’s just not my thing – but I do listen to Streisand pretty regularly, and that’s who she reminds me of here. As with Streisand, W’s voice has *so* much color and dimensionality and is so effortless and apparently unconstrained that it doesn’t even register *as* singing…. Rather, it’s like she’s speaking tonally/dramatically to you. It’s an amazing gift.

The vid’s new to me. I recall W. arriving feted for her movie star/top model-level height and looks (just as Alicia Keys did this decade) but the vid. still surprised me. Its *very* effectively cinematic – that could *be* Sliding Doors or The Bodyguard, and in some ways it’s amazing that it isn’t. The walking out of the studio in slinky dress and heels as we hit the high notes is a ding-dong classic moment that I’m glad to have seen now (thanks youtube!). The inevitable W. walking off alone final shot is more Sweet Charity than My Name is Barbra, but it’s pretty convincing. Triumphant miserabilism: I’m having the one I sha’n’t have, and it’s driving me mad, and it’s written all over my face, so I’m saving all my love for you. Thank you and good night.

I like this a lot – and the video serves the song well. It’s a terrific performance from Whitney – it’s restrained in an almost masochistic sense. She’s willing to suffer in the relationship for whatever crumbs of affection she can gather. I’m not condoning that attitude but it seems prophetic in the light of her future problems.

I can see some connection with X factor but it avoids the over egged emoting of the majority of those performers. For me, she fits in more comfortably (on this song at least) with singers like Anita Baker and, later, Mary J Blige.

She is part of a trend in 80s pop for what could be described as the rise of the pop dynasty, with much being made at the time of her debut of her relation to Thelma Houston and Dionne Warwick to name but a few.

I don’t hear pain and anger; of all things, this song sounds positively celebratory to me. I hear JOY. I can’t imagine Whitney singing this song with anything but a smile on her face. For me, the true insight of this song, and her performance, is that unrequited love can be just as fun as the real thing. “I’d rather be home feeling blue” than get a real relationship; that’s a frank and kind of disturbing line. She sounds utterly, unsettlingly content with her own dissatisfaction, in some weird paradoxical kind of way.

I’m kind of amazed how Whitney Houston seems to have disappeared from the public discourse; I barely ever hear her songs on the radio, even though old staples from Michael and Janet and Madonna I can hear pretty regularly. I’ve long though of Whitney’s career as defined by “I Will Always Love You,” vulgar displays of power in service of utterly bland material, but “Saving All My Love for You” puts the lie to that. This is the only song I think I would give Whitney the label of “soul singer” rather than Celine Dion-type “adult pop” singer.

Tom has found a lot in this song which I’d never noticed. I always thought the narrator seemed to be singing in a good mood, mind you it took me over a decade even to work out it was an adultery song so I probably would have missed the implicit content.
I suppose Whitneys vocals are so dreamy she could be singing the weekend football results and it would sound fine and this does. I would place it second only to ” Into the Groove ” amongst the ’85 chart-toppers (no small compliment).
I wouldn’t blame Ms Houston for the garishness of her imitators. I would say she has often squandered her gifts on syrupy crap like
” The Greatest Love Of All ” and ” One Moment In Time “.
Also her confidence turned to a certain imperiousness after a few hits.
Listen to ” Saving All My Love.. ” back to back with ” I Will Always Love You ” and you can hear the difference between an open-hearted joy in singing and over-bearing self-satisfaction.

I’m not sure if it was mentioned at the time, but the song structure of SAMLFY bears a strong resemblance to Crystal Gayle’s Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue. Just started humming one, realised it was the other. Blimey.

quoth wichita :

“but the song structure of SAMLFY bears a strong resemblance to Crystal Gayle’s Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue”

hmm, you’re not wrong there, bud.

Ultimately, and the end of the day, when all is said and done, etc, it’s a sludgy slow tune and they need to be pretty special to get pass marks from me ( WH herself had a MUCH better tune – if a wee bit bombastic – in a few years time, IMHO ).

You can save your production values, who wrote it, how old she was, what EXACTLY is she feeling, etc. Sorry, it’s just NOT IMPORTANT. Was it a good choon? Erm, no not really.

I’m shallow, what can one do?

NEXT!

must take my tablet now…………

I know what you mean, Swan, but this did feel like a major new singer, with a pretty astonishing voice, was in our midst. You can see why they went all Billie Holiday (I’m guessing) with the sleeve. Move Closer could’ve done with something similar instead of the digital jumper.

@22 Wichita. I agree that the cover works well as an announcement that a *voice* had arrived (see my note at #8 – I’m one of the biggest fans of the record here!). The jazz label reference ‘pushes it’ in my view only in that SAMLFY is a little simple melodically and lyrically for classic songbook status. The underlying song is good, but not in the same song-writing league as, say, the Gershwins’ ‘But not for me’ or Berlin’s ‘Happy Days’, i.e., the stuff that Barbra S. let loose on in the mid-’60s and blew people away with (see here if you don’t know that stuff, or if you just want to revisit, it’s awesome!).

Like a lot of people here I went back to this expecting far more vocal gymnastics but it turned out to be more subtle than I remembered which must mean that our frame of reference for “histrionic” has changed in the past 20-odd years. Instead it’s rather classy bedroom soul, like Anita Baker with pop chops.

I think someone above mentioned Alicia Keys and I can see the connection, both were seen as “the complete package” — beautiful girls with cross-racial appeal who could sing up a storm. Though Alicia writes her own stuff and seems more in control than poor Whitney.

I don’t see much ‘Blue Note’ in that cover at all. The photo maybe with it’s blue duotone and the classic jazz microphone pose but the typography is so far away from that I can’t imagine there was any intent there. If there was they made a right pig’s ear of it.

If you’ll notice I said they are both pretty girls with great voices, though Alicia writes her own stuff. Clive Davis produced Keys’ first album too. They’re more alike than they are different.

i’ve always seen the antimelisma line as just a blatant lovechild of rockism and corny indie fuxxors w/ some deepseated unease at the open expression of emotion uncloaked in irony lurking at the root of it. mariah (in her prime – let’s say thru butterfly) left me cold at least 50% of the time (though when it didn’t – ‘vision of love’, ‘i’ll be there’, ‘fantasy’ come to mind immediately – WOW) and her technique always seemed so much more strained than whitney’s, which even when unleashed (cf. ‘i have nothing’) seemed so relatively effortless while still powerful, esp in comparison to her imitators. anyhow disregarding whitney vs. mariah (and i’m all whitney though my preference is more just enjoying snappy bitch over giddy puppy)(stones > beatles also) or the pop vs. indie debate of ‘is it a good thing or a bad thing if the singer of a song actually knows how to sing?’, this song marks (arguably) the first definite appearance of the formula that would dominate (stateside at least) the number one spot for the rest of the century and lingers still – adult contemporary + r&b. r&b (esp of the buppie crossover quiet storm unto babyface type like this) suffers general critical neglect but nowhere near the level of adult contemporary which has been pretty much completely ignored (i’m not sure i can think of five crit pieces to really seriously deal w/ ac pro or con), despite having had a bigger place in the culture (in the us at least) over the past 25 years than for example rock music (nevermind indie rock music) – why is that?

“DYNASTY styling!”

31/32: while the anti-melisma line has indeed been spouted by a lot of knuckleheaded rockists and whimpering schmindie-ists, it’s also been expressed, hopefully in a more nuanced way, by plenty of people steeped in the work of Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Aretha etc… It’s all very well saying it came from gospel, but few of the many, many church-raised singer pre-the mid 80s went in for that extremity of vocal mannerism (isn’t there actually a substantial jazz element to this?)

(Not to be Lex-baiting or anything, but the high-pitched noises on a lot of Mariah records remind me of nothing so much as the feedback on early Jesus And Mary Chain singles).

Sinkah #24 – Sheila Jordan recorded just the one album for Blue Note in ’62 but what an album: Portrait Of Sheila. Barry Galbraith, Steve Swallow, Denzil Best – absolute magic.

#10: Whitney no relation to Thelma as far as I know.

#15: Gerry Goffin had six number ones in the U.S. prior to this, but none in the U.K. as far as I know. Impressively, “The Loco-Motion” hit number 2 twice with two different singers in the U.K.

Initially I only heard this song out of the far corner of one of my ears, and never gave it any thought until reading Tom’s write-up just now, but I’m very impressed. She mostly lets the lyrics take care of themselves, and this works very well for them and the performance. The frustration doesn’t lose any power for not being especially underlined (though Tom is right about how “To-NIGHT, Is the NIGHT. For feeling al-RIGHT” works in context).

#32 I prefer Stones to Beatles too but I absolutely love Emotions– and MTV Unplugged-era Mariah (completely bunny-free, unfortunately). Mariah’s leaping atop a thousand skies and a thousand clouds and kicking everyone and everything else off of them, and hurrah for her. I hear it as total excitement and emotion, though not in service to the emotions and not nailed-down particularly to the emotions of the words, which are there and deliver their emotions very powerfully, being strong words, but are only a small part of the story.

32 – absolutely agree, and the “open, irony-free display of emotion” is key, I think; and especially so when on such public, glitzy display.

Am going to c/p a pertinent thing that Tim F said on ILX (comparing Mariah Carey and Liz Fraser):

A lot of the argument for Fraser and against Carey seems ultimately to be rooted in a mistrust of emotional expressions that seem rooted in “universalist” mass culture. The attraction of Fraser is her idiosyncracy, her near-inimitability – this suggests a world of private, singular and perhaps inarticulable emotions. For some listeners I’m sure this would shore up their sense of individuality: “Fraser speaks to and for me because I am suspicious of “standard” emotional responses.”

Whereas Carey, who is nearly as singular, nonetheless belongs to a more popular and populist tradition, and is imitated by young singers everywhere. To really like Carey I think you first have to be open (consciously or otherwise) to the possibility of sharing some emotional responses in common with “everybody else”.

The point about young singers imitating the Careys and Houstons of this world is crucial – I’ve interviewed so many singers who grew up around them and Mariah in particular is a HUGE role model (even if a lot of these singers ended up finding their own voice and not sounding anything like her). The critical distrust of this (and mockery w/r/t X Factor wannabes influenced by her) is, I think, very rooted in its extreme girliness, too. Young girls hear a voice like Mariah and want to sing like her in the same way that they might want to be a princess or have a fairytale ending – and the male-dominated critical establishment is most dismissive of anything that codes teenage/tween girls.

I must say I am VERY DISAPPOINTED in the wrong-headed Focus Group reviews of “My Love Is Your Love” in Related Articles here…so much wrong with them all.

Lex at #13 is spot on re what we learn about the Houston character – it’s hard to imagine an attractive, confident woman like that (and I’m talking about the character, not necessarily Whitney) settling for second best and scraps when she could presumably grab a man of her own without too much trouble, but the portrayal is well drawn.

Agree with Tom that something’s going to give soon, but the line that seals the deal for me is not “toNIGHT is the NIGHT” – irresistibly sexy though it is – but “you said be patient, just wait a little longer / but THAT’s just an OLD fantasy” with the beats emphasising the crucial message to the guy and Whitney forcing out every syllable and stuff the vocal technique!

(Interesting to note from Wiki that the screenplay to “Fatal Attraction” was written in 1985 and taken round a few studios before the hit movie was made – something in the air obviously…)

A fabulous record and a great chart debut. We’ll no doubt talk about the vocal technique again when her later hits come up, but although I’m a bit of a rockist myself I think I’ll be more tolerant of THAT song than many…